The audit passed for months while two live Anthropic keys and the fleet
SSH password sat in tracked files. Three independent reasons:
- ALLOW_PATTERNS was matched against the whole "file:line:content" string,
not the path, so bare words like "test", "demo" and "example" dropped any
hit whose *content* merely mentioned them.
- `\.md$` was in that same allowlist and `--include` never listed *.md or
*.yml, so docs and CI workflows — where every real leak has lived — were
never scanned at all.
- The false-positive filter spelled the single-quote class `\x27\x27`, which
GNU grep does not expand in an ERE, so the empty-string rule never fired.
Now: scans tracked files via `git ls-files` (exactly the set that would be
published), covers md/yml/mjs/kt/toml, allowlists by path only, and adds
patterns for credentialed URLs and inline `sshpass -p`. Test fixtures under
testdata/ are exempted narrowly rather than by substring.
Verified by planting canary secrets in docs/api-reference.md and
.gitea/workflows/build-iso.yml — both file types the old version ignored —
and confirming the audit fails on them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
